Label:
self-release
Release Date:
24/04/2007

Serving up a volatile mix of 90s artrock laced with nihilistic no-wave overtones, Brooklyn’s The Muggabears carry faint echoes of Sonic Youth at their most doggedly atonal, even when marrying their grisly guitar stabs to relatively straightforward rock beats.

The closest they come to a tune on their excellently-titled new EP – and you’d still need a Hubble telescope to spot ‘em – are ’We Were Priests’, which sounds airy and skittering even as the guitars scream impending doom, and ‘Dead Kid Kicks’, a weirdly funky blues lick erupting in queasy bursts of noise like filthy steam rising from a Manhattan manhole cover. The rest struggle to make themselves heard over a violent sludge of sound, like the faint outline of corpses in the Hudson River.

If married to songs of genuine power or majesty The Muggabears discordant slashed guitar could tear your nightmares all kinds of new assholes, as it is they’re nothing a couple of aspirin and a nice lie down wouldn’t cure. Still, they're worth the headache.